November 15, 2004
Adwords to market affiliate products
Here are some practical guidelines for using Adwords to promote affiliate products. Guidelines are given for how much money to spend testing new Adwords campaigns, as well as how long to test new ads:
If a particular keyword gets 100 impressions with no click throughs, that is a good sign to erase it. If a particular keyword has over 100 impressions with a click through rate (CTR) of less than 0.5%, erase it. Likewise, if your entire test product has received 100 click throughs and no sales, it's time to end the promotion of that product.
I can't agree with some of the advice. For example a low CTR (less than 0.5%) is not bad if the few visitors who click are buyers. I certainly agree that 100 clicks and no sales would be time to give up!
There's also advice on when to stop testing and begin a campaign in earnest. Basically, if the ratio of "how much you're paying to promote the product verses how much you've made on the product is 0.75 or less, keep promoting the product." In other words, you should be seeing a 25% profit margin (or greater).
Further advice goes something like this: If you can generate more than one sale of the product and still have a good cost to revenue ration, you can stop testing and create a new campaign just for that product.
Personally, I'd like to see more than two sales before creating a new campaign. I'm not a scientist, but I would guess that from a scientifc perspective, two sales might be statistically insignificant.
Posted by James Trotta at November 15, 2004 9:14 AM